Harlequin - Jennifer Greene (5 page)

“How come some nice man hasn’t snapped you up?” Martha always asked, invariably, like now, when Phoebe was soaking her feet in a baby oil and clove mixture. “I just can’t understanding it. You’re so pretty, with all that gorgeous red hair—”

“I came close to marriage one time.” She gave the standard answer, standard smile, standard laugh. “But thankfully I escaped that fate worse than death by moving here.”

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“You won’t be singing that tune forever,” Martha said shrewdly. “He just wasn’t the right one. But it just makes no sense. The men should be pounding on your door.”

“Nah. I think word’s spread that I’m a mouthy, bossy troublemaker.”

Gus, who only asked one thing from her every week—to sit in the TV room holding hands for ten minutes with a dog on his lap—piped in, “I’ll marry you, Phoebe. You can have all my money.”

“I’d marry you for love any day, you sweetie pie. I don’t want your money.”

“A looker like you should be more greedy. Nobody can survive in this world without a little selfishness in their soul. You gotta think about taking care of yourself. Looking out for number one.”

It was funny, she thought, how easy it was to fool people. She’d never have done this kind of work if it didn’t give back to her tenfold. The truth was, she was selfish and greedy and she always put herself first.

And she proved it when her cell phone sang on her way home.

It was Harry Lockwood. “Could you come for Fergus again?”

“Can’t.” Her answer came out sure as sunshine.

“He asked for you.”

She believed that like she’d believed at fifteen when her date swore he’d stop, promise, hope to die.

“Look, if Fergus calls and asks me to come, I’ll set up a time with him. But it’s Sunday night. I haven’t had any dinner. I have to wash my hair, get my stuff together for the week, groom the dogs. Sunday nights are sacred, you know?”

“This is about hair?”

“No. It’s about my not believing your brother asked for me.”

“Okay,” Harry said, and hung up.

The cell phone rang again just as she was pulling into her driveway. “Phoebe? Did I mention the last time I saw you that I’m deeply and hopelessly in love with you?”

She laughed even before she recognized Ben’s voice. “I swear, the two of you are bad to the bone. But the answer is no. Absolutely no. I’m not intruding on Fergus again unless he specifically wants my help.”

Ben went on as if she’d never spoken. “I’ve never been tempted to marry, but then I saw you. I’ve always been a fanny man, and your darling little butt is really the best I’ve ever—”

She shook her head. “Hey! That’s fighting really dirty.”

“We have to fight dirty, Phoebe. Fox is in real trouble. He was doing fine for a couple days after you left, most of the week, in fact. But now I don’t think he’s slept a wink in the past forty-eight hours. If you’d just known him before this all happened—Fergus was always full of the devil, never sat still a minute in his life. He was interested in everything, active in sports and hobbies and the community. And kids. God, he loves kids. You can’t even imagine how good he is with kids. So to see him sitting in that
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dark room, doing nothing, not wanting to do anything—”

“Comeon, Ben. If you brothers are close and he won’t listen to you, why on earth would you think I could do anything? I can’t just go over there and bully him—”

“You did before.”

“He had such a bad headache before that he’d have let in the devil if it could have helped him.”

“We tried the devil. We’ve tried everything. You’re the only one who even dented that pain of his.” Ben cleared his throat. “Harry said you had to wash your hair.”

She knew that tone. It was one of those male “I’ll be understanding about this ridiculous female thinking”

tone.

“Harry also mentioned that possibly you might want a year’s worth of free dinners. And I was thinking—I don’t know where you live—but I told you I was the builder in the clan. I never met a woman who didn’t want her kitchen redone—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. This is ridiculous.”

“And while I was fixing your kitchen, you could eat at Harry’s restaurant—”

“Stop! I don’t want to hear another word!”

“Does that mean you’re coming?”

Three

Fox closed his eyes and stood absolutely still under the pelting-hot shower spray.

Maybe he’d given up sleeping and eating and couldn’t get his life back for love or money. But nothing kept him from showering once a day and sometimes twice.

Even after all these weeks, parts kept coming out of him. The doctors claimed that’s how it was with dirty bombs. Something new needled to the surface of his skin every once in a while. In the beginning he’d been horrified, but now he found it amazing—if not downright funny—what terrorists chose to put in dirty bombs. Bits of plastic. Hairpins. Parts of paper clips. Anything. Everything.

Some of the parts hurt. Some didn’t. Some scarred. Some didn’t. Mostly Fox was grateful that nothing had hit his face or eyes—or the cargo below his waist, not that he anticipated having sex again in this century. You had to give a damn about someone to get it up. He didn’t. Still, it mattered fiercely to him that his equipment still functioned normally. Go figure.

His obsession with showers, though, had evolved from a terror of infection. He didn’t fear dying, but damn, he couldn’t face the risk of another hospital stay if any more sores got infected.

When the water turned cool, he flicked off the faucets and reached blind for the towel. He moved carefully, because sometimes his left leg gave out. Technically the broken wrist and thigh bone were both healed, but something inside still wasn’t totally kosher, because one minute he could be standing or walking, and the next his left leg would give out.

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Tonight that wasn’t a problem—but apparently the fates couldn’t let him get off scot-free.

The first step out of the shower, he found himself teetering like an old man, dizzy and disoriented. The same child’s face swam in front of his eyes, drifting in the foggy steam of the bathroom—real, then not real, clear, then not clear. Sometimes the boy turned into one of the students he’d had; sometimes it was the boy in the dusty yellow alley on the other side of the world. He leaned against the glass shower doors and tried taking a long, slow breath, then another.

A headache was coming. A headache always followed one of the flashbacks to the kid. If he ever got his sense of humor back, he’d think it was funny for a guy, who used to dare anything in life, to be this scared of a headache. Of course, that was then and this was now. Before the pain attacked, he had to get himself out of the bathroom and settled somewhere safer.

Abruptly he heard something…the sound of a door opening? Either he imagined the sound—which would hardly be headline news—or it was Harry, coming to restock the refrigerator with another set of dinners he couldn’t eat. Whatever. He leaned over, hands on his knees, waiting for the soupy feeling to pass. Beads of water started drying on his bare skin, chilling him. His hair dripped. The towel…it seemed he’d dropped the towel. He’d get it. In a minute.

“Fergus?”

It was Bear’s voice. Ben’s, not Harry’s. “In here.” Damn, he hoped his oldest brother wouldn’t stay long. Bear hovered over him like…well, like a bear. All fierce and protective. All angry at anyone and anything who’d hurt him. All willing to do anything to make it all better.

Fox had told his brothers a dozen times that nothing was going to make this all better. The wounds’d heal. They were almost healed now. But whatever was broken inside him seemed like the old Humpty Dumpty story. Too many pieces. Not enough glue.

“Fox?”

He tried denying the dizziness, pushing past it, repeated, “In here.”

The denial thing seemed to work. He forced himself to pluck the towel from the tiled floor and straighten before Bear saw him and got the idea again that he was too sick to live alone.

“Hey, Fox, I brought…”

Oops. He’d assumed it’d be his brother standing in the doorway, but his brother was six-three and a solid 220. The intruder had thick, straight, long red hair, almost as long as her waist. Small, classic features. Blue eyes that snapped with attitude, a few freckles on the bridge of a bitsy nose, pale eyebrows arched just so. And a soft, wide mouth.

He remembered that soft, wide mouth. Actually, he remembered every detail of her features. It wasn’t that he wanted to remember her, but she was one of those rare women who no guy could possibly forget.

God knew why. She was no angel. That was for damn sure.

Even if her eyes and posture didn’t indicate excess attitude, she was wearing a red top again today—a
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red that screamed next to all that thick red hair. She must have bought the jeans in the boys section, because they bagged at the knees and drooped on her nonexistent butt. Then there were the boots—which were beyond-belief girl shoes and not real boots at all—three striped colors and a high heel. She’d kill herself if she walked far in them.

He caught all of her in a glance. One glance—that no amount of dizziness seemed to blur.

Obviously, finding him in the bathroom doorway had stalled her in midsprint. She’d apparently been heading for the living room, where she’d found him last time. Even if she’d guessed the location of the bathroom, she wouldn’t necessarily expect to find anyone standing there, naked as a jaybird.

Her gaze met his, then dropped below his waist, then shot right back up to his eyes faster than lightning.

“Aw, damn. Aw, shoot. Aw, beans,” Bear said behind him. “Phoebe, Fox, I’m sorry. Fox, I should have told you I was bringing Phoebe—I never heard the shower, just assumed you were in the living room—”

Fox took his own sweet time, wrapping the towel around his waist. Hell, she’d already seen the main event, and there was no way to hide all the bites and gouges and scars with one lone towel anyway.

Besides which, if he tried moving too fast he’d likely end up falling on his nose. “I’ll be darned. Did I forget calling for a physical therapist?”

“Now, Fox, you know I brought her. And I told you before, she’s not like the other physical therapists you tried. She’s more a masseuse.”

“Oh, yeah, now I remember that masseuse thing.” Fox met her eyes square. “It’s okay then, you can go home. That’s the one part on my body that I know is still working just fine.”

She sighed, but instead of looking insulted—as he’d hoped—she seemed to look amused. “Sex’d probably be the best thing for you, but you’re out of luck, I’ve had no training in that. For the record, I do have a PT license from Duke. And as far as body work, I’m licensed in Deep Tissue, Swedish, Shiatsu, Rolfing, Reflexology, PNF, and NautThai—”

“PNF?”

“Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation—”

“Forget it. Let’s go back to why you’ve had no training in sex—”

“You’re sure feeling peppier today,” she announced, which lifted his spirits like nothing else had in ages.

The thing was—if he could fool her, he could fool his brothers. Down the pike, he might even be able to fool himself. In the meantime, she’d itched his curiosity. “Why in hell would you throw out a degree from Duke in physical therapy to do massage work?”

“So I can get my hands on naked men. Why else?”

He saw his brother making frantic hand-motion signs behind her back—Ben was acting increasingly weird. But Fergus couldn’t take his eyes off her.

It wasn’t that she appealed to him exactly. She couldn’t, when no woman was yanking his chain these
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days—and the kind of woman who always appealed to him had boobs and a butt. She had neither, but damn. She was just so…zesty. Who’d have guessed she’d laugh when he tried to insult her?

Obviously, he had to try harder to annoy her.

“I’d think you could get your hands on a lot of naked men without having to bother guys who aren’t interested.”

“You’re so right. Getting men naked is amazingly easy. On the other hand, easy guys never turned me on. I like a challenge.”

“A challenge to you is barreling into a guy’s house who never asked you?”

She should have bristled for that one at least. Defended herself. Fought back. Instead she just said, “Not usually. But I’m making an exception because you’re so darn adorable that I’d probably break all the rules to get my hands on you. What can I say? You really ring my chimes, cutie.”

That was such an outright fib that she darn near rendered him speechless. His eyes narrowed. Nobody, but nobody, rendered him speechless. “You’re so full of bologna, I can’t believe it.”

“What makes you think I’m full of bologna?”

“Because you’re not remotely promiscuous.” God knew how such a personal comment flew out of his mouth, except it somehow bugged him, her talking about all those naked men. In spite of that luscious mouth and her wearing those absurdly sexy high boots, she just didn’t come across to him as easy—not any kind of easy. Beneath that whole frisky act, there was just something vulnerable about her.

Once the comment came out of his mouth, though, he had no chance to take it back. Her hands immediately formed small fists and arched on her hips. “How do you know I’m not promiscuous?”

“All right, all right, of course I don’tknow it. I don’t know you from Adam. But twenty bucks on the table says you’ve been celibate for the last year.”There. It was gone faster than a flash, but for that quarter of a millisecond he caught something in her eyes. Never mind the big talk and the long, gorgeous hair and all that sensuality reeking from her. Shehad been celibate.

“For all you know,” she said, “I’m happily married and have been having sex three times a day with my darling.”